2 Black Moms & A Mic
From diapers to degrees, these two black moms have seen it all and heard it all. Now they are bringing their insights on issues that matter to you. They will explore the range of issues on the minds of black moms everywhere, including helping your high school student navigate the college admissions process, resources tailored to the educational achievement of black children, battling the continuing problem of educational disparities, letting go and letting your child live their best life (and not re-live yours), and we will go introspective to explore what it means to find personal joy, health and happiness on the other side of motherhood!
2 Black Moms & A Mic
Let's Talk "Say Anarcha" by J.C. Hallman, the story of a young black woman at the center of early modern women's health (S.2, Ep. 6)
Some of the most important early advances in women's health came at the expense of young women who were used in experimental surgical procedures. In "Say Anarcha", J.C. Hallman unearths the story of a heroic black woman at the center of advances in modern women's healthcare. Join us in an intriguing discussion with author J.C. Hallman, his research and what he learned about Anarcha and other enslaved women forced to undergo experimental gynecological surgeries in 19th century Alabama.
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Hi, I'm Glenda. And I'm Lisa. And we are Two Black Moms and a Mic. Between us, we have six kids, four boys and two girls.
SPEAKER_03:And we're here to talk to you about everything from diapers to degrees. Welcome to our podcast. Welcome to our podcast. Today, we're so delighted to have J.C. Hallman. J.C. is a highly respected author who has numerous published books. In addition, J.C. has published a book of short stories and edited two anthologies of creative criticism. And he's the recipient of a 2010 McKnight Artist Fellowship in Fiction and a 2013 fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in the general nonfiction category. But today we want to talk to him about his current book, Say Anarka, which just came out this summer. And this book has gotten a lot of exceptional reviews by many outlets, including the New York Times. And he was recently interviewed about his book on National Public Radio. Welcome, J.C., Hey there. Thank you so much for having me. Great. We're really excited that you're here today. And I read through your book. Your research and your book are truly, truly fascinating, but also very disturbing and traumatizing to read about Anarcha. And for our audience, I just want to summarize that your book documents the use of enslaved women who were forced to undergo experimental gynecological surgeries in 19th century Alabama. And these surgeries were performed by a male surgeon who achieved great acclaim, but at the expense of so many African-American women who were subjected to incredible painful experiences. So this book really exposes a lot about this highly acclaimed surgeon. surgeon. Can you tell us more about your book and about the premise? Sure. I mean, I think
SPEAKER_00:just to address kind of the difficulty of the book, this is definitely not a cozy read, right? Right. And the way I thought of that was that I just kept coming back to this line in my head that reading is a form of bearing witness. And here was this really, really important and often overlooked moment in the history of medicine, which informs the world that we live in, in a lot of different ways. And so I approached the book in a very unflinching way, knowing that it was going to be a very heavy and even difficult read, but a necessary one to understand the world we live in, both in terms of the ongoing white supremacist mindset that continues to infect the country and in terms of coming to a deeper understanding about the health inequities that afflict the modern medical world.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it really touches a lot of emotional points, at least for me when I was reading it. Can you tell us something a little bit more about Anarka herself and how you came to find out about her and what intrigued you about her story?
SPEAKER_00:Sure. So the origin story for me and my journey with the book is not very interesting. I just stumbled across the term vesicovaginal fistula, which is a term for the condition that Anarka and a number of other women suffered from in the 1840s that were the center of the story, the birth story of modern women's health. Let's
SPEAKER_03:just to clarify, because I had to look
SPEAKER_00:that up. And that hole can be between the vagina and the rectum. It can be with the bladder. It can be with the urethra. And so vesicovaginal fistula, the term that usually gets used for this, is an abnormal opening between the bladder and the vagina. It is a horrific condition. And it is a condition that continues to affect the developing world and Africa today. And so... It caught my attention because I saw that this story, the ongoing health crisis in Africa, was connected to the story of the birth of modern women's health. That what looked like two stories, because people were already talking about this. They knew about Anarka. They knew about this doctor who had performed a series of experiments on Anarka and approximately 10 other women in downtown Montgomery, Alabama. But this line of connection from that story, this group of enslaved teenagers in Alabama to what's happening in Africa today and to the connections to everything we're talking about today in terms of health inequities in the United States and in the developed world. It was all one story. Yeah. So finding a way to tell the story from the past in a way that connected to the modern moment was essential for me.
SPEAKER_03:So how did you find that out, though, about Anarchist's story specifically? I mean, it's an incredible read because on the one hand, I feel like I'm reading fiction because it's so detailed. The Day to Day of the Young Women, Dr. Sims. It's almost like I'm reading fiction, but I'm not because I know that it's like a real story. Yeah. So how did you do your research? So there's a lot of questions in there already.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the book reads like a novel, but it's not. It's narrative. It's a narrative nonfiction. And, you know, there was so much about the story that there were so many complexities to the story that I thought that the way it needed to be approached was as a story, not as a or an academic study. Those works had been done. Yeah, because I think that's why it got me in. It brought me in. Right, right. Because of the way that it's written. Yeah, yeah. I thought that it needed to be a story that you inhabited. Yeah. You felt. You needed to feel the presence of these people. You needed to feel the complexities of the situations at those critical moments when particularly controversial things were happening. You needed to feel it and not just hear about it. And so that's why I approached it. And to answer your first question, you know, when I first was trying to discover what vesicovaginal was, your Googling just immediately heads to this story. It was, again, that connection from the ongoing health crisis in Africa to the story of J. Marion Sims and the experiments that he performed. He's considered the father of gynecology. So this was the critical moment. And he started the first women's hospital in New York, right? He's a founder. That's something he gets credit for. But it turned out that this hospital that he started in New York, he left Alabama in 1853 and founded a new hospital in 1855. And that's why there was a statue to him in New York City. He sometimes gets credit for starting this new hospital for women, the first hospital for women in the United States and maybe the world. There's debates about that. But ultimately, even that hospital in New York was just another field of experimentation for him. He traded experimenting on enslaved women in Alabama for experimenting on Irish immigrants.
SPEAKER_03:Wow. In New York City. He went from African-American women to Irish immigrants.
SPEAKER_00:Right. Which is not a parallel. There is no way in which Irish women, Irish immigrants are enslaved. They are free people. Yeah. But this was also a very, very vulnerable population. These were women who had escaped the potato famine on board what were called coffin ships. And so they come to the United States. They land in New York. They're poor. And there was definitely classism against the Irish in New York City at this time. It was trading one vulnerable population for another. But it's important to make that distinction and not pretend like Irish immigrants were the equivalent of the enslaved population in the United States. That's just not the case.
SPEAKER_03:So I mentioned earlier that the first of your stories about anarcha were published in Harper magazine. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. And it was caught by, I guess, Mayor de Blasio's people. So what happened back in 2017 is before the book was published. It's a little more complicated
SPEAKER_00:than that because there were these groups of women's groups and African-American groups that have been protesting this monument in New York for the better part of a decade. And I came along much later and I was more or less covering what these groups were doing by way of protesting that monument in New York City. It was all happening kind of before the monument debate started to happen and pitched Harper's, I'm going to write a biography of this monument. And of course, it talked about Anarcha and Sims. But it was finished, you know, in early 2017. And that's more or less right when Confederate monuments started to come down all across the country. And Harper's was just holding on to the article. And then the real thing that happened is the white nationalist march in Charlottesville over monuments. And there was a death and that became hugely controversial. And then those groups in New York, they staged another protest at the site of the Sims monument a week later. And this time the Sims story went absolutely viral. And that gave Harper's just enough time to take my already completed article and put it on the cover of the magazine. So when that debate in New York boiled over and de Blasio announced this 90-day commission to reconsider New York's policy on monuments, the magazine had just enough time to put it out so that we could get it to the members of the commission that were considering this question. But it's most accurate to say that that article played a backup role to the women and black youth groups in particular that had been protesting that statue for a decade and had been getting totally stonewalled by a number of institutions in New York City.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, because I didn't know until, you know, I kind of got up to speed about Anarka's story. So that's pretty incredible. So I wanted to turn our attention. We've talked some about Anarka, but what about her story, though? I mean, because she was experimented on as a young woman and there were a number of other women experimented on. What were those women supposed to do otherwise if they suffered from this
SPEAKER_00:fistula? The first thing I'll say is that Anarka has always been a kind of a ghostly figure in history because for many years, for decades, the only source that was known about her, that told us anything at all about her, was Sims himself. He was not a reliable source. Everybody understood that he was a self-promoter and a self-aggrandizer, and he was the only source. So even though people had been thinking and writing about her for some time, likening her case to Henrietta Lacks, for example, Yeah. And so my book is based on dozens, hundreds of sources about Anarka's life that are not found in any other source. And to come back around to the latter part of your question, Sims gets credit for being the first doctor to cure obstetric fistula. That's the narrative you'll see if you go looking for this. That's what I found when I first Googled it, though it stunk for me right from the beginning. And what I found is that it's just not true. You know, he wasn't the first to cure this condition. And even the cure that he claimed on Anarka was for a device that was abandoned just a few years after he published it. So there was a lot of falsehoods about this narrative that were just embedded in the history. But the truth at the time is that This was a very horrific condition. It's one of the worst things that can happen to a woman's body. And there wasn't many options, just as there's not many options for women today in Africa who wind up with this condition in very remote areas or who are required by policies of wife seclusion to stay on the family homestead and never leave. What this means, though, for Anarka and the others is beyond being enslaved persons who could not provide informed consent for medical experimentation. it meant that they were also an incredibly vulnerable population, vulnerable to coercion. Because women who have this condition would want to be cured, but that means they would be vulnerable to the false or exaggerated promises of someone who comes along and says, well, I can cure you. A terribly horrific condition. And at the time, there would not have been many options. And women who have this condition often wind up being ostracized by their families and their communities. Husbands leave them. They lose everything. It's a truly brutal condition and there would not have been many options at the time.
SPEAKER_03:Does Anarka have descendants that you're aware of? And if so, did you communicate with them at all or the descendants of any of the other women that were operated on by Dr. Sims? In the beginning of your book, you outline, and it's a lot of people who contributed to the book and to the compilation of information who have since passed away, right? The long list of names. Were you ever able to reach any of the descendants of Anarka or of those women who were subjected to Dr. Simms?
SPEAKER_00:The first part is that the way I told Anarka's story was by combining this primary source scaffold of her life, all these dozens of sources. But that was more like a skeleton. And so to give her life a sense of passion and presence and atmosphere, I called on the WPA slave narratives, the interviews with thousands of formerly enslaved persons, to call on the details of people who were Anarka's contemporaries, recollecting many years later what their lives as enslaved persons were like. And so, yeah, I credit all of the individuals whose narratives I called on to contribute to the telling of Anarka's story in that way at the front of the book. Just to
SPEAKER_03:read those pages right up front, center, to me was just really chilling. Yeah,
SPEAKER_00:it was really important to us. My name's not on the front of the book. There's no dedication. There's no acknowledgement page. We really wanted to pull all the attention to those names and, of course, to Anarka's name on the cover.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. And how long did it take you to pull all of this information and write your book? It
SPEAKER_00:was about eight, nine years. Man, wow. It was a long time. It was a long haul. But I want to go back to your question about descendants because that is really fascinating. I was able to calculate that Anarka had a total of 10 pregnancies that came to term over her lifetime. And she died quite young, probably at around 45, 47. It's not 100% clear exactly when she was born, so guesses about her age are just that. They're estimations. So she had four children living with her when she died. It appears that those children did not go on to leave children behind of their own. But she's buried alongside the man who was her husband at the end, a man named Lorenzo Jackson. You know, as I said, I followed her life story. We followed the story all the way to her gravesite, a marked grave in a lonely forest in Virginia. And so her husband had a daughter by a previous partner. Anarka had a daughter. And these two daughters became very close. They moved to Washington, D.C. They lived together here for their entire lives and were very, very close. Were family in every way but blood. That daughter of Lorenzo, Luisa, she left behind children. we have located descendants of that part of the family. Wow, that's amazing. And so we're now making an effort to make sure that her grave site is protected and that those descendants have access to it. When I contacted them, they knew that this had existed and they knew there were rumors that there was a significant person. So they had rumors of her story. Yeah, but they didn't know much. But the location of this grave had been lost completely. Some time ago, I escorted one of those descendants out to the gravesite. I'm going to be doing so again very soon. Oh, that's wonderful. That's really inspiring.
SPEAKER_03:And I want to talk a little bit, too, about Dr. Sims and his colleagues. They had to know that he was sketchy. Did you get a sense of the reaction of his colleagues to him?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. As I said, you know, in 2017, the Sims story went viral as a result of that protest. And there has been concern since then, as the story has become more controversial, that Sims always had his champions and his apologists. That's true even today. And those folks have tended to look at what's happening now, and they worry that we're projecting modern values into the past, which is like a historical no-no. You're not supposed to do that. When I'm critical of Sims, what I'm doing is I'm relying on his contemporary critics, that there were a number of doctors, many doctors, who were very concerned about Sims' methods and his ethics and his efforts to make himself wealthy and famous. And the amazing thing is that his greatest critics, the people who were most critical of him, were the ones who knew him best, his assistants. He had an assistant in Alabama named Nathan Bozeman, and he had an assistant in New York City named Thomas Addis Emmett. So his greatest critics were the doctors who were sitting right beside him as he worked. And it is those voices that I'm calling on to recreate the story of his rise to fame and the controversies that he triggered even in his own lifetime. Once again, it is not us projecting modern values into the past. It's us listening to the voices of the past, warning us about the future that this guy was bringing in.
SPEAKER_03:Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's so insightful. Tell us, why should we read this book?
SPEAKER_00:Again, I think it goes back to that question of recognizing that it's not just this moment from the past. It's not just a quirky part of history. We are living with the effects of this particular past. And I think, like right now, for example, we're living under a time when women's bodily autonomy is under as great a threat And if we truly want to undermine that, then the thing we should do is go back and undermine the legacies of the first people who tried to take away that autonomy. Yes. And if you want to truly change the trajectory of where we are now and where we're going, then you have to go all the way back to the beginning and affect that trajectory from where it truly began. And J. Marion Sims really does represent this crux moment of a sort of fulcrum moment in the history of medicine. And so I think that, again, going back to that idea of reading being a form of bearing witness. that this is the thing that can ultimately help us chart a better future. The way to chart a better future begins in the past.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it's interesting that you make that connection because, I mean, there's so many incidences in history where humans are used for quote unquote medical purposes, but just kind of butchered up. I mean, we know about the use of people in Tuskegee and for syphilis experimentation. And recently, Harvard University, I was reading, admitted to having humans of Native Americans for human experimentation from many, many years ago, but that they still have human remains in their laboratories and now are beginning to reach out to families, maybe in the last few years, reaching out to families to return the human remains to the families. So this is an issue that is clearly an historical issue, but still has present implications in the many ways that you've discussed and this story about Harvard returning human remains is very unsettling, I would think, for most people. And these were Native American human remains, principally.
SPEAKER_00:Can I respond? I think there's a lot to say there about Sim's role in that. I think that simultaneously, as a guy who was seeking the status of being a surgical pioneer by performing experiments on human beings, he was paving the way for a lot of even worse atrocities that came along after him. As I said, there were plenty of people who were calling for medical ethics at the time and who were expressing concern about consent and experimentation in the 1850s. But there was this other cadre that just really felt like the ends justified the means. And you see that, the fame that Sims accrued and the way that his legacy was solidified into a rhetorical facade, literally the father of gynecology, but then also literal facades in terms of the monuments that were created to him, that this, in And that inspired many others to follow in those footsteps. And that was a very white supremacist informed agenda that gave people a kind of quasi logical and sort of emboldened them
SPEAKER_03:to
SPEAKER_00:prey on vulnerable people. Right. It really feeds directly into the history of scientific racism and it feeds later into the movement of early 20th century eugenics. There are many, many ways in which people were following these particular footsteps. And what's important to remember, though, is that is that it isn't just Sims. I argue in the introduction of the book that Anarka is a symbol. I'm presenting her as a symbolic character symbol. She's a kind of composite figure who is symbolic of a lot of other women who suffered alongside her and who suffered at the hands of other doctors. But Sims too is a kind of symbol because it's not just him. It was the entire male medical establishment that was a lot of them wanting to follow exactly in his footsteps. Though again, it was other doctors who were raising concerns about This has
SPEAKER_03:been a great conversation. And now we've got a special guest. So we have Amy Hallman, and this is JC's sister, who is also a law school classmate of mine at UVA. Amy is an attorney in San Diego. We have her as our guest today to kind of fill out even more these issues of JC's disclosures from the book and issues of health inequity. So Amy, thank you for being with us today.
SPEAKER_01:Thanks for having me. Good to see
SPEAKER_03:you. I know, good to see you too. So Tell me, as the sister of J.C., what were your observations when he was doing his research for this incredible book?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I've watched his career for 20 years now, and I think this book in particular has been such a passion project for him. And about three years ago during the pandemic, he was towards the end of writing the book and he came out to visit me and was staying with me. And I just, you know, was watching him writing the end of the book and just kind of bearing witness to that was really special for me. And it was kind of the first time I got as invested in one of his books as I have. And now I'm really like helping to market it and it's become a passion project of my own.
SPEAKER_03:That's great. And to me, you know, gynecology It's just so personal for women and kind of treacherous things that like Anarka and the other women were subjected to were just so personal and just so enraging. What is your takeaways where that's concerned? I mean, it is on many levels just sort of such a personal topic.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's hard to read the book and not just cry. Some of my friends who have read it have said, I'm listening to the audible. I have to stop. I have to take a break. What she's gone through. It's just so I can't even imagine. It's so heart wrenching.
SPEAKER_03:And the thing is, like, because I know some people don't like to read difficult books or watch difficult movies, but I think we have an obligation.
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_03:Yes. You know, we have to educate ourselves. We have to know who the players were. Yeah. We have to know how the victims suffered. Right. So that we can guard against it happening, you know, again. And I think. I think J.C. raised the issue of the whole abortion
SPEAKER_01:debate. Yeah. And help us recognize that, you know, she really and the others, too, but she was experimented on, you know, more than 30 times. Yeah. She was the most consequential of them. And to have gone through that. I mean, it's amazing she
SPEAKER_03:survived it, quite honestly.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. Yes. And to give her rightful place and to recognize that, you know, we really all have a debt to her. That's
SPEAKER_03:so
SPEAKER_01:true. Because, you know, in this country, the conditions eradicated. That's not the case. In Africa. No, it's not. Right.
SPEAKER_00:Can I pop in there? Thank you to my sister for speaking so movingly. Thank you. It means a great deal to me that the book has come to mean so much to her. Thank you so much. is affecting lives in good ways today, though it has to be acknowledged that came at the price of snatching away a field of medicine that had traditionally been for women, midwifery. But it's also accurate to say there was one clinical advance that came out of the Alabama fistula experiments. Anarka and Lucy and Betsy and the seven others who formed the initial core of experimental subjects, they were gathered together. They lived together. They cared for one another during the extended aftercare period that was required for this condition. They went on to become nurses and assistants when Sims' medical students and his colleagues abandoned him in Alabama. Anarka had been a nurse before, during, and after the fistula experiments. which is another sort of new revelation from the book. But this was the thing that traveled. These young women pioneering a patient-centered model of care where women live together, care for one another, and eventually become complicit in their own cures. That's the thing that moved to New York City and then inspired a very famous fistula hospital in Ethiopia, the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital. And there's a plaque on the wall saying, oh, this hospital was inspired by J. Marion Sims. And then that hospital inspired clinics all over the The truth here is not that Sims inspired it, because what they did in Ethiopia is they did the same thing Sims did. They took the women who were fistula survivors and they turned them into nurses and assistants and caregivers. And in 2018, afterward for the book about all of this, I went to Ethiopia and Nigeria and Uganda to see these women who were like hundreds of anarchists living today, doing just what these young women in Alabama had done. That's the thing that is transforming lives today. There are millions and millions of women who suffer from this condition and have terrible life conditions, but some of them are being cured. And the thing to recognize, the thing that I wanted my book to nail down completely was that that advance that came out of the Alabama fistula experiments that owes nothing to J. Marion Sims and it owes everything to this small group of enslaved teenagers from Alabama. Wow, that's amazing.
SPEAKER_03:And I just to kind of take that idea and then fast forward a bit to where we are today with health inequities. I mean, you know, you read about, you know, women of means who are not given full access to health care, not listened to when they're in health facilities. And then you read about, you know, clinical trials that may, you know, not include women or, you know, minority women in particular when trying to find advances in medicine to cure, say, the heart ailments or other internal organ ailments. So I think that the story of Anarka that you've made available now to the world kind of feeds into the fact that all of these issues are important for the whole country, for everyone, for women and for men, regardless of your age and your race, your national origins, so that we have a healthcare system that, you know, is accountable to all of us. And so I think it seems like to me, the story of Anarka kind of helps us get closer to that kind of ideal. How do you feel about that, Amy?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think that's definitely the case.
SPEAKER_00:I think there are a number of great examples of prominent African-American women who find that they don't get the same kind of health care as Marina Williams. And in less famous cases, Dr. Susan Moore in Ohio, who was denied pain medication while she was dying of COVID. She was a physician. Oh my God. And she is in the hospital. She's a medical doctor and she's denied pain medication. She doesn't die from not being given pain medication, but on a kind of palliative level, she wasn't believed. And she said very bluntly that they treated her like she was a drug addict. You know, then there was just a recent story about involuntary hysterectomies happening. I think it was in South Carolina. It was just a few years ago. Yeah. Right. And he very likely believed that. But to say that, where does that come from in his history? It actually doesn't come from him. It comes from his biographer. a guy who wrote the only full-length biography of J. Marion Sims. And this guy said it very bluntly, said that black women have a resistance to pain bred into them by generations of servitude on and on and on. And he said that not in 1850. He said that in 1950. Oh, my gosh. So just recognizing, again, that it's not just Sims. It is that mindset that created and sustained his facade. And that is the thing that is trickling down to the modern moment.
SPEAKER_03:All I can say is, you know, you can't change minds overnight, but we can educate. And oh, and one last thing I do have to ask you. Why do you call it Say
SPEAKER_00:Anarka? I'm thinking of the Say Her Name movement, right? You know, I think that the idea that all anybody knew was her name for a long time. There was a moment in one of the protests at the site of the Sims Monument where those protesters were walking up Fifth Avenue, blocking traffic, chanting, Say Her Name, Anarka, Say Her Name. Oh, wow. Say Her Name, Betsy. So they said, Say Her Name, Say Anarka. Oh, yeah. And so I wanted to cite that. And then as well, you know, I think in that block of names we're talking about at the beginning, right? That to talk about the importance of names. And then I would say even during, throughout the book, there are times when I'm talking about groups of enslaved people and sometimes it just becomes a list of names. And I think that symbolically that anthem, say her name or say their names, say his name, George Floyd, this becomes a way of asserting loudly that we're not going to forget.
SPEAKER_03:Wow. Well, this, it's an incredible book and I can't say enough about how enlightening it is. You learn so much about our history and it's easy to read, to be honest with you. I mean, it's a very easy way to learn more about our history and to learn about the sacrifices of Anarka. So
SPEAKER_00:where can people get your book? Just about anywhere. all the usual places. It's been very gratifying to see a lot of independent bookstores giving it prominent shelf space. You can go online and order it surely, but it's also at these independent bookstores that are doing God's work out there selling books day by day.
SPEAKER_03:That's great. Well, thank you so much, JC, for joining us today. And thanks to Amy for sharing her views and her insights and some special tidbits about her special brother. Thank you. Thanks so much. Thanks for joining us in our podcast today. Be sure to check us out at our website at www.2blackmomsandamic.com, where we hope that you will subscribe. You can also hear this and our other podcasts on Google Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Audible, and Podchaser. If you like what you hear, we hope you'll give a great review.
SPEAKER_02:Hey, thanks for joining us today. This is Glenda. And this is Lisa. Two black moms in a mic and we're signing off.